Introduction to the Special Issue—School choice: Separating fact from fiction

Parental school choice is a hot topic. This development likely comes as no surprise to readers of the Journal of School Choice but it has caught many journalists, pundits, and policymakers off guard and poorly informed about what school choice is and does. Lacking a solid grounding in the research literature and facts about choice, school choice dilettantes are vulnerable to mistaken claims and misleading observations.

This project germinated with a graduate seminar at the University of Arkansas on the entire research field of school choice. My advanced doctoral students and I found there was much to discuss and debate yet few evidence-based reviews of certain key aspects of parental school choice. We also noticed that our classroom discussions, grounded in the research literature on choice, were decidedly different from the choice debates occurring in the public square, which were untethered from research at best, unhinged at worst.

I decided to remedy that situation by requiring that my students write systematic reviews as seminar papers. My only rule was that the papers could not be summaries of the test score effects of school vouchers or charter schools, since thorough compilations of the evidence regarding those questions already exist (e.g., Betts & Tang, 2014; Egalite & Wolf, 2016; Shakeel, Anderson, & Wolf, 2016).

The quality and originality of the papers led me to propose this special issue. To avoid insularity, I reached out to school choice researchers outside of the University of Arkansas to submit manuscripts on important topics not covered by the seminar papers or to serve as scientific peer-reviewers of the manuscripts. The peer-review process identified a cohesive set of nine high-quality articles to publish in this special issue.

These reviews are not intended to teach the reader everything there is to know about the burgeoning field of school choice. My graduate seminar on choice assigned 109 different readings and even that expansive set required some painful cuts. For an encyclopedic review of the field of school choice, I recommend The Wiley Handbook of School Choice (Fox & Buchanan, 2017). I am confident, however, that even school choice experts will learn from reading these brief, up-to-date review essays. I know that I did.

The article order is linked to the logic of parental school choice. The first piece, by Heidi Holmes Erickson, examines how parents choose schools and what school features are important to them, focusing on private school choice. Erickson finds that parents consistently say that academic considerations influence their choice of schools, though academics often are not the single most important aspect of a school for them. Test scores do not regularly define the academic quality of a school for parents, she reports.

The second article, by Elise Swanson, scrutinizes the evidence surrounding the effects of public and private school choice programs on school-level racial integration. The claim that school choice segregates has been central to the current policy debate regarding vouchers and charters. Swanson demonstrates the fallacy of sweeping claims that expanded choice necessarily worsens or improves the integration of U.S. schools. The effect of choice on integration depends crucially on the kind of choice program, key elements of its design, and the context in which it takes place as well as the definition of integration used in the study.

Kaitlin P. Anderson provides a natural extension to the Swanson article by examining the extent to which school choice enrollments appear to be influenced by student ability in ways that suggest school “cream-skimming” or selective “push-out.” Although the charter sector as a whole educates slightly lower proportions of students with disabilities and English learners than traditional public schools, the rates differ substantially within the sector, with some charter schools serving students with special needs exclusively. Anderson points out that no studies to date have determined if lower enrollments of students with special needs in charter schools is because of actual cream-skimming or due to a strong “attraction-bias” of such students to the extensive special programs in traditional public schools. Once enrolled in charter schools, there is no evidence that students with special needs are systematically pushed out of their schools of choice.

The effects of school choice on civic values is another topic central to the current choice debate. Corey A. DeAngelis examines the results from 11 statistical studies of how attending a private school through a choice program affects student political tolerance, civic engagement, and social order. He finds that, in all cases, private school choice has either a positive effect on civic outcomes or no clear effect. He reports no findings of private school choice harming civic outcomes.

Phillip M. Gleason provides a much-needed systematic review of the empirical evidence regarding charter school best practices. Gleason reports that an urban location, extended learning time, consistent behavioral policies, and an achievement mission are the charter school features most consistently associated with higher student test scores. Characteristics of charter schools with no evidence yet supporting their test-score efficacy include class size, school size, teacher qualifications, status as a networked or independent school, and school age.

The effects of private school choice on parent satisfaction with schools are summarized by Evan Rhinesmith. Experimental evaluations of this question, which rely on scholarship lotteries, are guaranteed to be free from self-selection bias but could suffer from other biases because private school lottery winners know that they won and families that lost the lottery might feel “sour grapes” from the loss that affect their subsequent evaluations of schools. Conversely, observational studies that compare private school choosers with public school choosers are not vulnerable to the “sour grapes” threat but could be biased by self-selection. Fortunately, the results of the research are remarkably consistent, regardless of methodology. Allowing parents to choose a private school for their child increases parent satisfaction with schools.

Brian D. Ray provides the first systematic review of the peer-reviewed scientific literature addressing several crucial questions surrounding homeschooling. Ray reports that homeschooled children generally reflect the diversity of the school-age population regarding race, ethnicity, and income. The most distinctive feature of most homeschooled families is married parents. Empirical studies indicate that homeschooling has a positive effect on a variety of outcomes including educational achievement, educational attainment, and social development.

Malachi Nichols examines the effect of various forms of public and private school choice on noncognitive attitudes, such as grit and conscientiousness, and behaviors, such as school attendance and crime. He reports many null effects from the research base but concludes that the findings tilt negative regarding noncognitive attitudes but positive regarding noncognitive behaviors. Students in schools of choice may be holding themselves to higher standards than their comparison group peers when self-reporting their noncognitive attitudes, a phenomenon known as “reference group bias.”

Leesa M. Foreman concludes the set of articles with a review of the attainment effects of public and private school choice. Foreman finds that both forms of school choice tend to increase the likelihood of students graduating from high school and enrolling and persisting in college but cautions that generalizing from only 13 studies of these effects would be premature.

Please dive into these articles. They provide a cornucopia of evidence regarding what happens to students, families, schools, and communities when parents have more educational choices.